Did Jesus Have a Wife?

According to a top religious scholar, Karen L. King, this 1,600 year-old papyrus fragment suggests that early Christians believed Jesus had a wife — possibly Mary Magdalene. Ariel Sabar explores the significance of such a discovery on the persistent theological idea of a celibate Christ:

What it does seem to reveal is more subtle and complex: that some group of early Christians drew spiritual strength from portraying the man whose teachings they followed as having a wife. And not just any wife, but possibly Mary Magdalene, the most-mentioned woman in the New Testament besides Jesus’ mother. The question the discovery raises, King told me, is, “Why is it that only the literature that said he was celibate survived? And all of the texts that showed he had an intimate relationship with Magdalene or is married didn’t survive? Is that 100 percent happenstance? Or is it because of the fact that celibacy becomes the ideal for Christianity?”

How this small fragment figures into longstanding Christian debates about marriage and sexuality is likely to be a subject of intense debate. Because chemical tests of its ink have not yet been run, the papyrus is also apt to be challenged on the basis of authenticity; King herself emphasizes that her theories about the text's significance are based on the assumption that the fragment is genuine, a question that has by no means been definitively settled. That her article's publication will be seen at least in part as a provocation is clear from the title King has given the text: “The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife.”

(Image: "Karen L. King, the Hollis professor of divinity, believes that the fragment's 33 words refers to Jesus having a wife." Via the Smithsonian)